You see, my dad was a real man’s man. It isn’t just the legend I’ve created of him in my head, he really was. He had motorcycles, boats and classic cars - for most of my childhood I remember a car engine being rebuilt in our garage. He was an outdoorsman; a hunter and fisherman to the extreme – taking my mom on a canoe trip for their honeymoon. And he was an athlete. He played semi-professional lacrosse before I was born, played and coached ice hockey his entire life until his heart literally stopped working on the ice in his late forties and played golf every single day the courses were open the last few years of his life.

Thank goodness my husband has some sense. George woke up the morning after the ultrasound as I was becoming a self-proclaimed medical physician and saw me sitting under the dim light of our bedroom window examining ultrasound photos and he promptly asked me what I was doing. I told him that I was nervous about a few of the things that I saw on the scan so I was trying to compare them to images online and that I was worried. He said “put those away right NOW, you are not a doctor.” I knew he was right so I slid the images back into their envelope and set them down.

I’ll never forget sitting in that examination room with the ultrasound machine staring us in the face while my husband and I waited for the doctor’s arrival. When she began the exam, I decided that I wouldn’t even look at the screen. I would just accept the worst before the test even began. My only expectation was that we would leave knowing we wouldn’t be having a baby. So there she was, the doctor with her ultrasound wand, “There is the sac, there is the little baby, and there is the heartbeat.”